Author: Ting, BlockTempo

In this bull market, the public chain Solana has With the advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees, it dominates most of the traffic of the meme season craze. On November 22, the price of SOL token exceeded US$260, setting a new historical high.

Looking at Ethereum, the first public chain, there has been no significant breakthrough in recent ecological development. In addition, high gas fees have caused users on the chain to avoid it. As a result, the price of Ethereum currency continues to slump.

However, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently said that Solana’s good days may be coming to an end.

The crypto media The Defiant tweeted today (29th) that in the latest episode of Podcast, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, discussed how Ethereum Layer 2 can surpass Solana in terms of latency and throughput, and bluntly stated that Solana’s golden age is coming to an end:

Bitcoin, Ethereum square and Solana: The focus of competition is different

Justin Drake:

If you want to summarize this competition , it can be said that: on the one hand, the competitive advantages of Bitcoin lie in its stability, Lindy effect (historical durability) and currency properties; while the focus of Beam Chain is to maximize the efficiency of Ethereum Layer 1, so it is closely related to Bitcoin The competition is more direct. Solana, on the other hand, is performance-focused.

In my model, Solana’s competitor is actually Ethereum’s Layer 2, not Layer 1 itself. The good news for Solana is that it has performed well over the past year or two on two key performance metrics: latency and throughput.

Solana’s advantage is no longer: latency and throughput

Justin Drake:

In terms of latency, Solana has a very short slot time (time interval). But for Ethereum, The arrival of pre-confirmations will greatly improve latency, even surpassing Solana. Currently, Solana's average latency is 200 milliseconds, but the pre-confirmation mechanism will reduce latency to nearly 10 milliseconds, which means in terms of slot latency. there will be 20x improvement.

In terms of throughput, we have witnessed the vigorous development of Layer 2 this year. There is a website rollup.wtf that demonstrates from a computational perspective (in terms of per Ethereum's goal is to allow the entire ecosystem to process as many transactions as possible, and Layer 2 has demonstrated its ability to scale horizontally. The overall throughput is already about 100 times higher than that of Ethereum Layer 1, and it is likely to increase to 1000 times or even 10,000 times next year. This is a sustainable and scalable architecture. p style="text-align: left;">Meanwhile, Solana The strategy adopted is to centralize all activities on a single server. Each validator node requires a large server to handle all activities, but the performance of these servers is basically reached, so Solana cannot significantly improve throughput. It is impossible to increase its gas limit by 10 times next year, and Ethereum is likely to expand its overall gas limit by 10 times through Layer 2.

In summary. , we may be about to see Solana The golden era is over, because the two performance indicators it was once proud of will no longer have a competitive advantage.

Interestingly, Anatoly, co-founder of Solana. Yakovenko also quoted a tweet from The Defiant and attached a picture to say:

"The golden age of Solana is over, and the era of multi-signature has arrived."

This tweet seems to be sarcastic, implying that the Ethereum Foundation lacks practical results and will only use the statement that "Ethereum is about to surpass Solana" to motivate its ecosystem.users and developers within. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem attaches great importance to technologies such as multi-signature and account abstraction)

On the other hand, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake also tweeted today (29th) that the Ethereum Foundation is investing tens of millions of dollars in zkVMs projects, including zkRISC- V Formal verification, Poseidon cryptanalysis, and L2beat for zkVMs.